James Weldon Johnson

James Weldon Johnson (1871—1938) is a poet and civil rights activist who was born in Florida to black parents who had never been slaves. His father was a headwaiter at a Jacksonville resort, and a preacher. James attended Atlanta University, since such opportunities were not available for Blacks in Florida.

His expansive career included become a teacher and school principal, a practicing lawyer, and a writer for musical theatre in partnership with his brother Rosamond. He served as a U.S. consul in Venezuela, and later in Nicaragua, and then became an editorial writer for the New York Age. In 1917 he published his first poetry collection, Fifty Years and Other Poems, James Johnson worked for many years as an advocate for Black rights with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, until 1930 when he became a part-time teacher at Fisk University.

Although agnostic he was greatly influenced by the spiritual heritage of the Black church. His influential compilations, The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925) and it’s follow up, drew attention to this important musical tradition. This work also influenced his most celebrated poetry collection God’s Trombones (1927, Viking) in which he found a dignified form for presenting Black religious experience and practice.

The following poem is from God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. The book was illustrated by Aaron Douglas.
“© This work is the property of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text.”

Listen Lord

A Prayer

O Lord, we come this morning
Knee-bowed and body-bent
Before thy throne of grace.
O Lord — this morning —
Bow our hearts beneath our knees,
And our knees in some lonesome valley.
We come this morning —
Like empty pitchers to a full fountain,
With no merits of our own.
O Lord — open up a window of heaven,
And lean out far over the battlements of glory,
And listen this morning.

Lord, have mercy on proud and dying sinners —
Sinners hanging over the mouth of hell,
Who seem to love their distance well.
Lord — ride by this morning —
Mount your milk-white horse,
And ride-a this morning —
And in your ride, ride by old hell,
Ride by the dingy gates of hell,
And stop poor sinners in their headlong plunge.

And now, O Lord, this man of God,
Who breaks the bread of life this morning —
Shadow him in the hollow of thy hand,
And keep him out of the gunshot of the devil.
Take him, Lord — this morning —
Wash him with hyssop inside and out,
Hang him up and drain him dry of sin.
Pin his ear to the wisdom-post,
And make his words sledge hammers of truth —
Beating on the iron heart of sin.
Lord God, this morning —
Put his eye to the telescope of eternity,
And let him look upon the paper walls of time.
Lord, turpentine his imagination,
Put perpetual motion in his arms,
Fill him full of the dynamite of thy power,
Anoint him all over with the oil of thy salvation,
And set his tongue on fire.

And now, O Lord —
When I've done drunk my last cup of sorrow —
When I've been called everything but a child of God —
When I'm done travelling up the rough side of the mountain —
O — Mary's Baby —

When I start down the steep and slippery steps of death —
When this old world begins to rock beneath my feet —
Lower me to my dusty grave in peace
To wait for that great gittin' up morning — Amen.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

Richard Osler*

Richard Osler (1951—2024) is a Canadian poet who began his writing career as a journalist with The Financial Post newspaper in 1975, and through the ‘80s was a regular panellist on the weekly "Business Column" portion of the national CBC radio program, Morningside.

As a poet, Richard was one to primarily point to the work of others through such activities as his long-running blog Recovering Words, and one who dedicated his time to leading poetry writing workshops and poetry as prayer retreats. His first full-length collection Hyaena Season was published by Quattro Books in 2016.

One connection I had with Richard was selecting, and working with him on, one of his poems for the outdoor art exhibits of Imago’s project Crossings which appeared in downtown and midtown Toronto throughout Easter 2022. His last e-mail to me came less than a month before he was taken by cancer in late October. He said, “These last 16 weeks since diagnosis [have been] the most meaningful of my life.”

He says in a poem from his new book:
----Give death a face a voice directed me.
----My own face now wise with the news
----of death inside of me. If I walk
----to the mirror and look is it me I see
----or death now come out from hiding
----inside my face?

Richard died just hours after he had attended an online launch for his final poetry collection, What Holiness Will I Bring? (2024, Frontenac House). In describing Richard’s insistence on revealing to us this “art of knowing / and being known” Ilya Kaminsky said “This insistence is generosity. What do we learn? We learn to live passionately, intently, with a fire of clarifying search. We learn poetry is a spiritual discipline, the kind in which the world is our friend.”

Many years ago, Richard sent me a copy of his privately printed chapbook Not Yet (2006). Here, I will share one of the poems from that book.

Remnants

Faith is this day:
Waves gather up and fall.
Sun pours in from the east.
Tethered boats move
out on the bay. The breeze knows
my face. The brown dog belongs
to its stick, my throwing, the water
that holds them both up
and her sad moaning when I stop.

I have faith in this breathing
and writing and the crow’s black caw.
These geese left with three goslings
from April’s twelve. The smaller stick
chewed and now in pieces at my feet.
The volcano’s black stones
lost in a mountain’s last breath.
The driftwood logs left on the beach.
My own life, coming apart
into the smaller things —
this day
holding my faith in the promise
of another.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Richard Osler: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

A.F. Moritz*

A.F. Moritz is one of Canada’s leading poets. He was born in Ohio, and teaches at Victoria College, University of Toronto. He has lived in Toronto since just before his first collection Here (1975) appeared. Since that time he has published 21 further poetry books, including his most recent collection, Great Silent Ballad (2024, Anansi). Three times he has been a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry, and in 2009 he was awarded the Griffin Prize.

In October, I attended a reading Al Moritz shared at King W. Books in Hamilton (along with John Terpsta and Brian Bartlett) where he read exclusively from this new book. Moritz opened with “Dead Skunk in the Road”, a poem reviewer Colin Carberry says, “makes it clear that he knows that life does not end at death, and those who believe that it does are forced to bear the burden of their erroneous belief.”

In an interview, from the time when Sparrow: Selected Poems appeared, Moritz spoke of his interactions with various poets, particularly Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ashbury, in fine-tuning his world view and his expression of it. He said:
----“In dark times, poetry has to be under the sign of hope. And with
----hope, thinking is really from the end, not the beginning. It's
----realizing that the always possible beginning is the permanent,
----if hidden, presence of the good end in every moment. 'Origin'
----really means not so much any past but the fact that, in a time
----of evil and hope, the structure of existence is this: a beginning
----toward the good that is always possible and always needing to be
----made possible again.”

He underlined these thoughts with lines from Hopkins’s poem “God’s Grandeur” — which he says he always keeps before him — a poem of hope that acknowledges “man’s smudge” but declares “nature is never spent”.

The following poem is from Great Silent Ballad.

The Gift

I’ve long given up the dream
of having something to do
with the coming of the good kingdom.
Just let it be coming and let me live
over to one side
and then when it arrives let me live
in one of its rooms off one of its alleys.
It will be plenty simply finally
not to fear my own filth, the puzzle
of the whereabouts of food, the rain
of muddy plaster spheres always falling
a little late, mirroring beneath my ceiling
the pure rain after it starts hitting
the porous tar above. It will be plenty
not to meet, whenever I go out, the random
knives into my eye on the sidewalks,
the random onset of blindness, the lying
waiting to be scraped up. Plenty
not to feel the noise of the sirens
screeching nearer as relief. It will be plenty
and undeserved just to be alone
and the least known beneficiary.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about A.F. Moritz: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

John Leax*

John Leax (1943—2024), known to his friends as Jack, is one of the pioneers of contemporary poetry written from a place of deep evangelical faith. The first of his six poetry collections, Reaching into Silence, was published by Harold Shaw Publishers in 1974. He also wrote one novel Nightwatch (1989), and several books of nonfiction. His 1993 book Grace Is Where I Live was expanded and republished with Wordfarm in 2004.

Jack Leax was also a professor of English and poet-in-residence at Houghton College in upstate New York from 1968 until 2009. He passed away from cancer on September 1st.

The following poem is from his poetry collection Remembering Jesus: Sonnets and Songs (2014, Poiema/Cascade). I am honoured to have worked with Jack as the editor for this, his final book.

Recognition

John 2:14-15
Luke 2:48

There was, I thought, something about the man
Familiar, an image pressed on the coin
Of memory. But slow, afraid, I’d join
The fallen under toppled tables, I ran.
I’m sure, now, I needn’t have. His harsh whip
Sought the rash of thieving profiteers
Hawking oxen. Sheep, and pigeons, their sneers
Mocking country pilgrims come to worship.

I crept back when breath returned. Around
Him stood the Pharisees. His zealousness
For the Father’s house brought back a scene. Years
Ago I watched a quiet boy confound
The elders. As then, I saw his brightness
Was a sword. His mother’s love would end in tears.

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about John Leax: first post, second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer*

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) is a German pastor and theologian who was among the earliest critics of the Nazi regime. He was outspoken in his criticism of the leader — even before Hitler came to power — fought against the party’s influence on the German Evangelical Church, opposed such policies as euthanasia and antisemitism, and was connected with the plot to assassinate the Führer.

He was arrested by the Gestapo in April of 1943 — initially charged with conspiring to rescue Jews. The following poem was written in December of 1944, and sent in a letter to his fiancée, Maria von Wedemeyer, as part of a Christmas greeting, from his cell in the basement of the Gestapo prison in Berlin. After that building was destroyed in an air raid he was transferred elsewhere, and eventually to Flossenbürg concentration camp. It was there that he was executed on April 9, 1945, just two weeks before it was liberated by the Allies.

The poem was first published posthumously, by being added to later editions of Bonhoeffer’s 1937 book The Cost of Discipleship. The poem’s translator is Geoffrey Winthrop Young.

New Year 1945

With every power for good to stay and guide me,
comforted and inspired beyond all fear,
I’ll live these days with you in thought beside me,
and pass, with you, into the coming year.

The old year still torments our hearts, unhastening:
the long days of our sorrow still endure.
Father, grant to the soul thou hast been chastening
that thou hast promised—the healing and the cure.

Should it be ours to drain the cup of grieving
even to the dregs of pain, at thy command,
we will not falter, thankfully receiving
all that is given by thy loving hand.

But, should it be thy will once more to release us
to life’s enjoyment and its good sunshine,
that we’ve learned from sorrow shall increase us
and all our life be dedicate as thine.

Today, let candles shed their radiant greeting:
lo, on our darkness are they not thy light,
leading us haply to our longed-for meeting?
Thou canst illumine e’en our darkest night.

When now the silence deepens for our harkening,
grant we may hear thy children’s voices raise
from all the unseen world around us darkening,
their universal paean, in thy praise.

While all the powers of Good aid and attend us,
boldly we’ll face the future, be it what may.
At even, and at morn, God will befriend us,
and oh, most surely each new year’s day!

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Dietrich Bonhoeffer: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.